Aries Lao
AI Systems Engineer & Enterprise Technology Leader
22 years leading enterprise technology. 7 months building production AI systems from scratch. Both halves in one person.
From directing teams to building the systems.
I spent 22 years leading enterprise technology programs and implementations at Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, UCLA Healthcare, and Cleveland Clinic — directing multi-million dollar portfolios, leading teams of 30-50, and advising executives on technology strategy and digital transformation.
Then I asked myself: what if I could build the systems, not just lead the teams that build them?
In August 2025, I stepped away to find out. Seven months later, I had designed, built, and deployed production AI infrastructure — all running on a single on-premise GPU server, zero cloud spend, funded by driving Uber between builds.
What I built.
Every capability below is running in production — not a tutorial project, not a proof of concept. Live systems, serving real users.
LLM Inference Infrastructure
Multi-model gateway with intelligent routing, quantized model serving, VRAM-aware load balancing, and automatic failover chains.
Production ML Pipelines
End-to-end model training with walk-forward validation, SHAP feature selection, experiment tracking, and automated model promotion.
Multi-Agent Orchestration
Cognitive memory architecture with sensory, episodic, executive, and metacognitive layers. Self-healing circuit breakers.
Real-Time Data Engineering
WebSocket stream ingestion, streaming feature computation, and sub-second ML predictions on 36+ years of time-series data.
Neural Networks & Ensembles
XGBoost, CatBoost, LSTM, HMM regime detection, 12-cell Mixture-of-Experts, and autoencoder feature extraction with A/B experimentation.
Full-Stack Applications
React, Astro, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase with TOTP MFA, tiered subscription SaaS, and Cloudflare edge deployment.
AI Content Generation
Automated audio and video pipelines producing broadcast-quality output 3x daily — 400+ episodes across 5 channels, zero human intervention.
DevOps & Reliability
systemd service management, 3-tier monitoring architecture, Grafana observability, and autonomous self-healing watchdog.
What I'm looking for.
Senior or Staff AI Engineer, AI Platform Lead, Head of Engineering, Technical Program Manager, or AI Solutions Architect — somewhere I can bring both the builder and the leader.
Open to full-time, contract, or fractional leadership. Based in Los Angeles, prefer remote.
"I didn't just learn AI from courses.
I learned it by shipping production systems."